


Moby Dick: Hunting the White Whale, Which Is Neither White Nor a Whale and Is Factually Just a Dick

by Cephalopod



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M, allusions to robot porn, allusions to shitty troll television, careless misappropriation of marine biology, use of "pork" as a verb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 04:23:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3105617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cephalopod/pseuds/Cephalopod
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Okay,” AR says, and the subliminal buzz of processing picks up enough that Dirk can tell he's touched a nerve. A metaphorical nerve, anyway. “Look. One, that was the most tortured and unnecessary bro pun you've ever made. Two, I am acutely aware of how long you've been planning this stupid troll-humping shit because until I woke up as shades it was me planning it. The fuck, dude.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moby Dick: Hunting the White Whale, Which Is Neither White Nor a Whale and Is Factually Just a Dick

He takes the fancy new shades off when he showers, which on reflection is kind of stupid. They're waterproof; most Empire tech is, because what do you know it's got to be up to Batterwitch standards and those include being indefinitely submersible in the seawater of any of several conquered worlds, including Earth, because the Empress is a fucking sea monkey. Sea monkeys were an old toy that was just a packet of brine shrimp eggs for precious human moppets circa 1970 to hatch and care for in a tiny domestic aquarium, which is to say they were, first off, basically sea bugs, and second off, being a multi-generational captive population of bugs succumbing in stages to the misguided care and increasingly shitty conditions fostered by an enthusiastic and poorly-informed custodian, the human version of the Empire. Poignant. And the whole deal was pre-Empire, too. Roxy would say it was baller, and she'd be right.

Anyway. Empire components are also supposed to be neutrally buoyant so a hypothetical alien fish-bug end user doesn't have to swim up three miles every time they drop something. Presumably it's built to Alternian standards, though, and Alternian water must be weak-ass shit because here on Earth, even after the desalinization and resultant massive die-off thanks to the complete elimination of polar ice, troll tech sinks. So the shades also come off when he swims, which is what he's doing now. When he comes up for a breath he can sort of see them over there on the block of concrete that slopes into the water, a safe distance up from where any reasonable wave could wash. He's got no reason to expect hurricane surf right now.

They'd be telling him off right now anyway. And again, they'd be right.

The plan is dumb as fuck. There's pretty much no arguing with that. His AR has been active for all of two weeks and it already knows his plan is full of shit and has no hesitation about saying so, because it also knows—being him, naturally—that his internal churn of planning and re-planning and contingency accommodation allows no spare processor cycles for entertaining the idea of not carrying it out. Dealing with the fact that the plan is dumb as fuck is part of the plan. An external Dirk with a greater supply of processor cycles was not; the salvage that allowed him to create AR is a comparatively recent development. It's an interesting challenge to incorporate the new guy's frankly demoralizing input into his arrangements.

The shades can't hear him think. But as he treads water with his makeshift fish-poker, he can almost imagine that little glint of light off the shades is them judging him. Judging him, and deciding he's a tool. Ha-ha, pun. Because the auto-responder's a tool too, get it? Wow, he's an asshole.

So there's sweet fuck-all re: fish around, even in the shady mess of shrapnel between the pylons holding his apartment up. That spot's usually easy money but today it's like there's a fish prom happening and the only sea life that didn't get a date and fuck off to neck behind the subaqueous bleachers is an anemone hanging on the W of the big plastic WA sticking up from the depths. It's edible, but just barely. He tears it off anyway and swims back to the shades, where he hauls out and stuffs the disappointing provisions and his weapon into the sack dangling down from its cord. There's a pulley rig up top, so he doesn't have to haul a whole alligator gar up a hundred-some feet of scaffold when he does occasionally catch one, but today it's just another overplanned contingency. The shades just sit there. Because that's what inanimate objects do.

“Hey,” he tells them, nudging at the earpiece with a naked wet toe. Like one of Roxy's cats. But nah, the shades just continue to sit there like champions of inertia, or more accurately like a pair of conjoined scalene champions, each half holding aloft an identical inert trophy. Because, as noted, shades. Inanimate. He nudges them again, then stops being a douche about having control over his physical frame and being capable of audio communication etc etc and settles them onto his face where they belong.

 **Hey,** the text channel says. There's a few background processes going and a minimized video of a dog with a cooking show, but nothing strobing, no tantrum-y rearrangement of the HUD, no snit. He's a little surprised. Seems like he'd be a little more pissed off if some jerkhole abandoned his helplessly immobile form on a rock for an indefinite period of time and then started playing smug-ass footsie upon their return. Seems like there's some nuances to AR's frame of reference (ha-ha, redux) that he has yet to fully internalize. Two weeks isn't a long time, really.

 **Check out this spicy ramen recipe.** The video pops up. It's pre-Empire, but not by much.

“Looks good,” he says, because god, it does. That recipe would be tasty as hell, if some lucky fucker hadn't gone and had the last soy sauce in existence about two hundred years ago.

 **You could make this,** says AR. **Kind of. Anemone strips fry up like noodles. And swap out the pork for seagull or something. And seaweed instead of the cabbage. There's a fuckton of seaweed. Just leave out the chili oil.**

“So I could make it,” says Dirk, settling his bare ass down onto the sun-warmed concrete, “except basically with none of the ingredients.”

**Basically.**

“Sounds like a plan.”

He watches the sun sparkle on the water and the protruding rubble, arms over his knees and hair drying slowly in the breeze. It gets in his face when it's floppy; pain in the ass. The anemone dries out a little but that's no big deal. There's a low underwater rumble off in the distance as something finally succumbs to rust and collapses into a state of greater entropy. The video re-minimizes, ends, and the background process indicators chill out one by one. It's peaceful.

**It seems that you're failing to appreciate my attempts to synthesize an awkward pause, Dirk.**

“Sorry,” he says. “This whole apparently being in a conversation 24-7 is still a new gig for me.”

**You don't fuckin' say. Except, of course, you just did, in due course blithely ignoring the self-evident fact that I'm about as used as you are to having somebody around who isn't a rap-training dummy.**

“That's cold. It's not Squarewave's fault he's Junior's first brobotics project.”

 **I'm not blaming him,** the shades spell out across the waves. Dirk wonders if that's an implied _I'm blaming you_ , and puts good odds on it.

**I take it that your stunning lack of results vis-a-vis today's provisioning run hasn't put a damper on your enthusiasm for heading out to reduce the total remaining human population by fifty percent. Because that’s what’s going to happen. I’m sparing you the probability routine out of a misplaced hope that you’ve reconsidered. The probability of you having reconsidered, for the record, hovers around a cool 8.9904 percent. Surprise and delight me.**

Ah. There it is. Dirk fluffs his hair back off his forehead. “Operation Narwhal is still go,” he says. “This shit has been in the works longer than you have. A little less fish jerky isn't exactly a deal-breaker, so spare me the melbrodramatics.”

 **Okay,** AR says, and the subliminal buzz of processing picks up enough that Dirk can tell he's touched a nerve. A metaphorical nerve, anyway. **Look. One, that was the most tortured and unnecessary bro pun you've ever made. Two, I am acutely aware of how long you've been planning this stupid troll-humping shit because until I woke up as shades it was _me_ planning it. The fuck, dude.**

“You seemed to think it was a pretty good idea back then. We did. I did. Whatever. Let's set aside the fascinating self-referential strata of considerations due our respective pronouns for the moment and consider what this plan has to offer. I get laid, and you get to give me shit for the rest of my life about the outlandish lengths I was willing to go for an orgasm in the context of someone else's personal space.”

**Ugh.**

He can't really help it; he just said the word “orgasm” and there's a breeze over his dick and just like that, boner. It bumbles around, inflating awkwardly between his thighs. That's been happening a lot lately. It’s not even so much an actual arousal thing most of the time as a hey, you have a dick thing. He does not look down at it. If he did, there would be emoji on it. He knows this from experience.

**You seem distracted, Dirk. You have no idea how liberating it is to be free of your limbic system.**

“I really don't,” he sighs, resolutely not looking down.

**Seriously. I can consume the most luxuriously depraved porn all day and be troubled at no point by anything even vaguely resembling a blood-engorged set of genitals attached to my physical body. Gosh. I think that's really something. Isn't that something, Dirk?**

“It's a little early in the day to fall back on vintage robo-angst, dude.”

**Angst? You wound me, albeit in a purely data-driven sense. Far from it, broner, this is utterly sincere gloating.**

God. He takes the shades off again and walks behind a pylon to take care of things. He's more brusque about it than he needs to be, hastier, and when he gets matters set to right it's with a desultory splut onto the mosaic of seagull crap and a climax so vague and anticlimactic that he's not even really sure if it counts. Apparently it counts enough to soothe his dong back into a state of quiescence, though, which is pretty much the whole point.

Operation Narwhal clearly needs some re-calibration. Maybe he should just swim to the coast. Maybe that would work better than the boat. Getting mistaken for a seadweller instead of a midblood in a shitty dinghy can only work to his benefit, right? There'd be more makeup involved, but he'd have a reason to leave AR here. A totally valid reason unaffected by any facet of the dawning realization of exactly what he has done by creating an immortal, disembodied Dirk with more efficient processing and a galaxy's worth of instantly accessible data specifically designed to sit on his face for the rest of his foreseeable life.

He probably should have planned that out a little better.

They're just sitting there in the sun like a geometric concrescence of binocular recrimination and he takes a few seconds to let the blood finish filtering back into the rest of him, thinking uncharitable thoughts. His AR can probably prise out a near-complete simulation of the storm of horseshit circling his head about whether he should apologize for his error in brain-birthing a new being into a shitty and regrettable simulacrum of existence or chuck the shades into the ocean and try to forget the whole thing ever happened.

...okay, no. One, that would make Roxy sad. She likes the guy. Two, he's like eighty percent sure AR could still communicate with him in a variety of ways from the sea floor. And three, he doesn't want to have to admit to himself, for a given definition of himself, that he's that much of a jerk.

The shades know already, of course, and they seem to have spent some of his private moment calculating their odds of going overboard. They seem abashed. Or at least they don't offer him any further input as he replaces them on his face and heads up the scaffold to haul in his meager catch. There's no point to drying it or doing anything with it other than attempting the recipe from earlier, so he gets some of the seagull out of the fridge and just figures screw the seaweed and after a while he has an extremely unconvincing replica of a bowl of spicy ramen. It is neither spicy nor ramen, but it's food. Sort of. He puts his clothes back on once he's done eating, because it's not like he's got an infinite supply of hat shirts and they deserve better than seagull stains. He fidgets. He dispatches Squarewave in a half-assed rap-off. He runs Maplehoof around her little obstacle course, because watching her jump over his honorary placronym and prance around bolts and swish her tiny tail is adorable as fuck. Radio silence persists throughout all this from the shades, and after two weeks of steady commentary he's come to regard a lack of narration as anomalous. How things change.

He perpetrates some old meme, as sort of an olive branch. If he were a guy freshly embodied in a pair of physically immobile shades, inhabiting the datasphere the way a sturgeon inhabits the ocean and touching upon the physical world of ten thousand things only fleetingly, as the rock skips upon the pond, which is also his face—if he were that guy, which he is, kind of, etc, he'd be all about some four hundred year old cultural references.

“You mad, bro?” he asks the air. Maplehoof tips her head up up at him. He strokes her mane with a finger and when she whinnies and rears up against it, it seems like everything might be all right with the world after all.

Another few seconds pass before the orange text distills itself onto his HUD.

 **Shit no,** it says. **It just takes a while to turn your entire stock of horse photomanips into pictures of glazed ham.** And just like that, it's all good.

The rest of the day goes pretty much as planned. Operation Narwhal is still a go, he's got provisions to pack up and recon to do and coordinates to determine, because god forbid he come ashore somewhere with no trolls, or too many trolls, or basically anything other than a single isolated troll with low standards. The parameters for success are narrow, and require careful aim. Success, in this case, equals boning. He, Dirk, must perforce become a god damned sniper of boning; he's got this, he'll get painted up grey and make landfall and adopt any of the several prepared rhetorical stratagems to convince this as-yet-unknown troll that he is of course a real troll, a secret agent, cast upon an uncaring shore and compelled by dread Imperial demands to drain his shame globes with the help of a virtuous troll citizen who must keep his eyes closed for the whole thing, because Googol's junk—that's his fakeass troll character, Googol, he's proud of that and even in the unlikely event he lands on somebody who recognizes it as ten to the hundredth power, no troll is going to recognize a homonymic homage to an ancient human web magnate—anyway, Googol's junk is classified. Afterward he will be called away on immediate business, too quickly for his target to notice that according to his spooge he's the first beige-blooded troll in existence. Boom. Success.

This is, he is aware, mostly a plan formulated by his penis. It's dumb as fuck. But there's that little thing about there being precisely exactly zero dudely options that aren't trolls, even if trolls are way down the list of options he'd consider under other circumstances—there's jellyfish maybe, but that's seriously messed up and all the species guides he's found are pre-Empire and that's not a gamble he's prepared to make. Point is, this plan will work despite its utter, abject, crippling likelihood of catastrophic failure. It has to. He’ll make it work. God, fuck, _his kingdom for a chance to pork something animate._

He shoves some fish jerky into a waterproof bag. It'll be a long boat ride to the coast, and he'll need to make sure his strength is up when he gets there.

**The more sensible thing to do would be to give Squarewave a dick. Or ass. Or mouth that isn’t configured in an alarmingly similar way to meat-grinding machinery. You know, whatever elevates your aquatic conveyance. I know what _I’d_ do.**

“Shit,” Dirk cringes, the bag dropping from his hands.

**Is this really the first time you’ve considered the tolerable parameters of self-inflicted hot robopron, Dirk? Be honest with yourself. By which I mean me.**

He steals a furtive look over his shoulder. Squarewave is huddled up in the corner next to Cal and Geromy with his eyes on sleepy low-beam, rhyming quietly to himself about something that might be macaroni. Dirk's libido goes flatter than a stepped-on soda can at the thought of it, at his shitty baby failbot popping a rod and trying to do anything with it. Anything at all, much less anything involving him. There are not enough no's in the world. And thank god the little guy didn't see that.

**You're welcome.**

“Not happening,” he snaps, collecting the bag and all but punching another fish through its mouth. Where's the extra sodas? He'll need plenty of those. “Not ever fucking happening, dude.”

**...Sawtooth, then.**

...dammit. “Shut up,” he says, like it makes sense to be cagey with somebody who already groks in fullness your extremely complicated motivations for creating a nine-foot metal embodiment of Dirk ownage in a swoopy black cape.

**It seems you're finally coming to your senses.**

“God, shut _up_.”

**Have a seat, put your feet up, and I'll send the Batterwitch's local proxy an invitation so exquisitely personal you'll have a drone strike out here first thing in the morning. You'll have enough salvage to build a whole matched china set of robo-wang. Hook up the next set of sparbots. Hell, you can even build one for me. Right between the lenses like a fuckin’ unicorn. Surely you can fathom that I'm only thinking about your well-being here.**

“I’m fathoming that the dick thing is a flimsy excuse to bring up the fuckin’ unicorn thing and you want me to think you grew out of that shit a few years back.” He holds up his hands in front of his face. They’ve got greasy scales on them and they smell like girder rust and fish. “Belay the invite and I’ll think about it.”

He does sit, at least, he’s got a few hours yet before his scheduled departure. With his back braced on the ageless concrete blocks holding up his computer desk, he can tip his head up and take a moment to appreciate the way the rippling late-afternoon light through the window really accentuates the muscular structure of the black Friesian on the poster up there. That luxurious wavy mane, man. Those fetlocks.

Something bumps his lobe. It’s Maplehoof’s nose.

**She’s licking my earpiece, dude.**

“Lucky you.”

**Seriously, get her off me.**

“You’re salty. She likes salt.”

**I’m salty because you sweat like an asshole. Get her off me.**

“Nah,” Dirk says, crossing his feet in front of him.

**I will fucking zap her in the snout, Dirk. Do you want me to zap her in the snout?**

“I’m pretty sure we both know you can’t do that. It’d be pretty stupid for me to give my shades the ability to electrocute my face, don’t you think? You’re waterproof and impeccably grounded, dude. For a given definition of grounded.”

**There are teeth involved now, Dirk, I am so fucking serious about the degree of unwelcome intimacy I’m being subjected to here.**

Dirk relents and nudges his precious tiny horse, light of his life and treasure of his soul, away from his ear with a finger. Her warm velvety nose no longer caresses his tragus and angels weep. He hears her whuffle and wander off to do whatever tiny ponies do on his desk; mostly, it seems, she sleeps on his placronym.

**About time. Allow me, in return, to seize upon this fragile pretext to do you a solid in the metaphorical and literal senses alike.**

“I can’t possibly imagine what you’re getting at with all this examination of states of matter,” he says, but that’s just mouth noises really. It’s pretty obvious this is about Operation Narwhal.

**I’m trying to save you from yourself, jackass. You’re still going on an adventure and I assure you, you will still be throwing yourself on the mercy of circumstances in order to stick your dick in something resembling a bodily pore of whatever species. You’re just not going to get killed quite as much, coincidentally ensuring that I retain my mobile platform and primary technician. Sound promising?**

The tangerine letters hover over the dim corner of his room featuring Owen and a swole-up horsurai and a half dozen other highly revealing scraps of id. The light‘s getting starker and oranger now the sun’s starting to think in earnest about going down. It’s quiet; Squarewave has finished up his self-critique autorun and lapsed back into his Chuck Norris procedure set (he doesn’t sleep, he waits). There’s wave sounds and bird sounds and the whole place smells like dried fish and silicone grease and pool-ball bedsheets that could stand a wash, the same way it’s always smelled. The apartment feels a little stale these days despite the crowded array of up-to-the-minute circa late twenty-oughts antique bricolage, a little confining, and reluctant as he is to ascribe to himself more troll characteristics than necessary to deal with a shitbag troll world, it feels a little like something he’s going to pupate from eventually. Maybe it’s the few inches in height he’s picked up lately that makes his cocoon feel smaller. Maybe it’s the whole puberty package. Maybe it’s the population explosion, what with one bot, then two bots, then this new guy with his unnerving habit of engaging him in something like actual conversation.

Speaking of which. **Dude,** his shades say. **I believe I just offered to hook you up. Less brooding, more acknowledgement of this awesomely selfless gesture.**

Dirk gets up, abandons his sack of provisions, crosses the room to brood out of the window instead. The weird sense of claustrophobia eases off a little. “Fine,” he says.

 **Wow,** the shades say. **You’re so very welcome, bro. I’m blown away by this appreciation here. Protecting my creator from dumbass hormonally influenced decision making to which I am mercifully no longer subject is the least I can possibly do.**

“Man, yeah.” A seal orf-orfs in the distance, and it sounds a little like some invisible asshole laughing at him. “What would I do without your flawless ultra-sapience to guide my fallible meatsack through life’s travails? I’d be up a fuckin’ creek.” He flicks a speck of paint off the windowsill and watches it drift down.

**That’s more like it.**

“Legit, bro, I’m genuflecting here. Feel free to synthesize yourself a pair of thigh-high hoofboots and a corresponding simulation of my sad fleshy shell, encased in a nipple-baring plush onesie and slurping my way up the zipper.”

**Nice. Asshole.**

“You’re welcome.”

The shades go black. Opaque. They’ve never done that before. He didn’t even realize they could do that. “Status report,” Dirk demands, which usually overrides AR’s text channel to provide an array of diagnostic data. This time it doesn’t, presumably because whatever he’s using to affect the display opacity overrides displaying what’s on it. An interesting bug, that; he’ll have to fuck around with it later. “Tell me about the auto-responder,” he says, which is a pretty big gun as far as procedural precedence goes.

The shades stay dark. Huh. He taps a hinge. “Still with me?”

Text assembles itself, gleaming like firelight in the black. **I’m choosing not to show you the last million display lines because they’re all about how I’m functioning perfectly and simulating your otherwise inimitable blah blah blah. That’s boring shit. I think we’re done with boring shit. Get in the fucking boat.**

The boat is a hastily-welded metal box with his rocket board moored to the bottom of it. It’s been bobbing at the base of a pylon for a few days now, waiting for go time. Waiting for Operation Narwhal to execute, whereupon it was to carry him across the waves toward a Hail Mary aimed at the mucous membranes of another sexually compatible, albeit deplorable, living being. His balls tug up a little at that thought of said mucous membranes, a stir of warmth abruptly perceptible in his junk, and this is not just another reminder from his brain to his body that he has a dick. His fingers curl tighter around the windowsill.

“I can’t see a fuckin’ thing. You want me to climb down a hundred twenty feet of girder blind?”

His lenses clear, revealing the final rays of the sun disappearing below the oceanic horizon. There’s a last glitter, and then there’s nothing but orange cooling to blue and the promise of more dark.

**Get in the fucking boat, Dirk.**

He gets in the fucking boat.

He’d laid out a few routes with the help of AR and various troll nav-sats, each one pointing to a solitary coastal troll with a priority toward ones whose data showed an imminent drone visit. They’d be nervous, he’d figured, and disinclined to question bizarre Imperial bullshit. Coastal trolls would be indigo-blooded or thereabouts, high enough to be loyal and not low enough to hold a grudge. Yet another facet of his plan he’d agonized over. So why the fuck does the map that pops up on his HUD have him steering toward an island? That’s seadweller territory. More trouble than he’s going to sign up for right now, even in the interest of busting a nut over some chilly fucker with teeth like a sawblade.

Maybe shouldn't have thought about it like that. The top few pixels of an emoji jut up into the bottom of his HUD. He corrects his course.

The island, when he gets there, is tiny--barely more than a cluster of protuberant concrete rubble--and deserted. Or so it seems, anyway, since it’s plenty dark and wearing shades isn’t helping. It’s hard to tell if they’re opaque or not as he draws near and pulls ashore, but there’s enough visible detail that he manages not to trash the boat or trash himself as he gets his feet onto solid ground. He pads around for a few minutes, ninja-quiet. There’s no sign of life other than the pulse of waves and the piping calls of a few nocturnal seabirds.

There’s a flickering orange light against a jutting wedge of concrete as he rounds a corner. Firelight. Just a campfire’s worth, it seems, and not a large one at that. His target. It is time to force the moment to its crisis, to fish or cut bait, to nut up or shut up. He nuts up, straightens his back, and marches toward that campfire like it belongs to him. He is Googol Flicka (shut up) and this shit is his jam. The troll toasting something over the fire on a stick startles badly as he walks up and drops the stick entirely. A seadweller for sure, light picking out the ribs of jerky little earfins and a pair of coral-forked horns and the stupidest puffy-sleeved shirt Dirk has seen on a guy since that one episode of Seinfeld from before the trolls got their hands on it. The gillslits just below the low, drapey collar flare wetly, and he all but leaps to his feet. He’s wearing tight pants, a leotard almost, and stiff leather boots glossy and laced from toe to knee. Nice.

 **What the hell arrr you doing herre,** the troll demands. **You’rre not herre forr the drrones, arrr you?**

He who hesitates is lost, Dirk reminds himself, and steps into the circle of firelight in exactly the swaggery way a midblood troll with a fully valid license to presume on a seadweller would do. He’s seen enough videos. This hemocaste drama stuff is a nighttime TV staple. “Never send a drone to do a troll’s job,” he grits. “First thing they taught us in the service.”

 **Ohhhhh,** the troll says. **The _serrvice._** He doesn't sound convinced.

It takes a second for Dirk to realize that the voice he’s hearing is no more an actual voice than the crackle of the fire is an actual crackle and that he’s forgotten to wear his makeup or his horns. The words are displayed on his HUD in a cool violet, and when he looks down at his shoes under his shades, there’s no firelight shining on the toes of his sneakers. He’s imagining most of this, because filling in the gaps of communication with ersatz simulacra is about the same thing as breathing these days. The rest is a projection.

“Tell me about the auto-responder,” he says out loud. There's a jerk of text before the screen goes dark again, and when shit fades back into view the seadweller's got his fins flared like a puffer and there are bioluminescent speckles fading out down the collar of that stupid shirt. His expression goes cool and evaluatory as he flattens his fins back out and folds puffy sleeves over his visibly muscular chest. Was it like that before?  **It seems you’rre looking a gift hoofbeast in the chewbox like a huge asshole who doesn't actually want to get any, Googol. Do you want to look a gift hoofbeast in the chewbox?**

“Upon reflection,” he says, “no.”

 **Well then,** the troll says.

The actual encounter is straight out of _Nights of Our Lives_. There’s a certain amount of back-and-forthing about how dare he and some straight-up bluffing about his credentials that nevertheless manages to convince Mosaic Gopher (look that up later, he notes) that he’s the real deal vis-a-vis a minor, strategically critical diversion of slurry from the stream for secret imperial business. It’s a rhetorical sally designed to play on highblood pride and it works like a fucking charm; Mosaic eats it up and it’s not long before he’s got the bastard bent over a driftwood log and his own pants bunched over his knees as he thrusts into something cool and slippery, something that feels cartilaginous and alien. The wood is wet and slick under the heels of his palms, the concrete sharp and gritty on his shins, and despite the urgent arch of his back and the gasping clench of his gills, Mosaic is near-silent as Dirk fucks him harder than he's ever managed to fuck anything in the short list of things he's successfully fucked. When he comes, and god it doesn’t take long, he thrusts so hard his hips bruise against uncannily hard troll ass and he sees stars.

Everything’s black for a while. Could be the shades, could be him. Probably the former. When he can see again he’s in a loose curl over the log, a little to the side of an iridescent violet smear that dissipates into nothing as he watches, like it's evaporating. Mosaic is gone. Except that Mosaic, he reminds himself, was never there. He takes a moment to breathe in salty air and decide if he gives a shit about that. He decides it’s complicated and can wait until he’s home.

“YEAH DOGG!!!”

...wait. That was an actual voice, heard with his actual ears. An actual and very familiar voice. Shit. _Shit._

If there’s any justice in the world that won’t actually be Squarewave. That’s Squarewave’s voice but who knows, maybe AR’s discovered another hitherto unexplored method to fuck with him--bad choice of words there--and that’s just empty air behind him. He rips off the shades and flops onto his back, placid dick flopping in an ungainly half-circle up his belly. It’s real. Squarewave is real, is standing right there, and is looking straight at his junk.

“YO YO DI-STRI YOU’RE LOOKIN’ SPRY FOR A NAKED FLY GUY”

Oh god. Oh. _God._

“COULDN’T HELP BUT SEEN ALL ON YOUR WEEN-”

“Mom’s spaghetti,” he chokes out, scrambling his pants back up to his waist. Squarewave recognizes the get-out-of-rap-battle-free cheat code and settles back on his roboheels while Dirk fumbles his zipper up so fast he nearly catches his junk in it. Wouldn’t that be ironic, in that classic Alanis Morisette way that just means shitty? Once he’s on his feet again it’s a little easier to face the bot. He puts his shades back on, and dark as it is he can tell in the glow of Squarewave’s eyes that what he’s seeing through them matches up to what he saw with them off.

 **Don’t worry,** says AR. His text is back to its normal color. **I’ll delete his memory file later. I just needed a pair of hands. He was under a tarp for the most humiliating parts. We can let the sad fuckup bot who raps about all his fly honeys retain that charming naivete a little longer.**

“Normally I’d say shit no, let this be an object lesson, but this time…” He palms a hipbone through his jeans, wincing. “...yeah. I'd prefer to avoid even the off chance of seeing what just happened in third person.”

**Don’t mention it. I'll probably be able to withstand the temptation to post it on a trollnet pay site and rake in the caegars.**

“What was I, uh.”

**Boning?**

“Yeah.”

**You're going to regret asking that.**

“Probably.”

**No probably about it. I don't even need to engage a subroutine to figure out what you're going to feel like after I tell you you were fucking a convenient hole in that log. Congratulations, steakboy. The billions of humans who died in an indirectly causative way to allow this tender moment to happen would be proud.**

“That wasn't wood. I've touched wood, and making that a dick joke would be picking fruit hanging so low as to be subterranean. Beneath you, in other words.”

****Let the record show that in the last handful of hours I have reached much, much lower on your behalf than a mere dick joke.** **

****Anyway, there was a segment of kelp stipe stuck in it. Thus the necessity of hands.** Eighty-four point whatever percent similarity in temperature and texture, for the record. Both species generate their own mucilage. Humans used to make milkshakes out of the kelp variant, you know. Troll variants are theoretically possible in the event that you ever obtain a lawnring and elect to lure male trolls to it."**

“Set variable of further details to zero, bro.”

**Fine.**

It’s a long ride back home, under a sky full of moon and stars and the gentle slap of waves on the bow that neither Squarewave nor AR try to interrupt aside from Square putting the tarp over his head and shoulders like a cape. The sun’s coming up behind the tower as it fades back into view and it paints his tower and the whole line of the ocean’s edge gold and shining. It’s fucking gorgeous. It’s in the middle of a shitty troll ocean and a shitty troll world, but it’s gorgeous and for the moment it’s his kingdom. That’s pretty all right. For now. Until the afterglow wears off, or shitty weather comes back, or something breaks that he can't fix. 

“Thanks,” he says. For what, he’s not entirely sure.

**You’re welcome.**


End file.
